So far, I go along with the stream of my brother Saxons; but here, I imagine, I part company with them.  They will have nothing to do with the Welsh language and literature on any terms; they would gladly make a clean sweep of it from the face of the earth.  I, on certain terms, wish to make a great deal more of it than is made now; and I regard the Welsh literature,—­or rather, dropping the distinction between Welsh and Irish, Gaels and Cymris, let me say Celtic literature,—­as an object of very great interest.  My brother Saxons have, as is well known, a terrible way with them of wanting to improve everything but themselves off the face of the earth; I have no such passion for finding nothing but myself everywhere; I like variety to exist and to show itself to me, and I would not for the world have the lineaments of the Celtic genius lost.  But I know my brother Saxons, I know their strength, and I know that the Celtic genius will make nothing of trying to set up barriers against them in the world of fact and brute force, of trying to hold its own against them as a political and social counter-power, as the soul of a hostile nationality.  To me there is something mournful (and at this moment, when one sees what is going on in Ireland, how well may one say so!) in hearing a Welshman or an Irishman make pretensions,—­ natural pretensions, I admit, but how hopelessly vain!—­to such a rival self-establishment; there is something mournful in hearing an Englishman scout them.  Strength! alas, it is not strength, strength in the material world, which is wanting to us Saxons; we have plenty of strength for swallowing up and absorbing as much as we choose; there is nothing to hinder us from effacing the last poor material remains of that Celtic power which once was everywhere, but has long since, in the race of civilisation, fallen out of sight.  We may threaten them with extinction if we will, and may almost say in so threatening them, like Caesar in threatening with death the tribune Metellus who closed the treasury doors against him:  ’And when I threaten this, young man, to threaten it is more trouble to me than to do it.’  It is not in the outward and visible world of material life, that the Celtic genius of Wales or Ireland can at this day hope to count for much; it is in the inward world of thought and science.  What it has been, what it has done, let it ask us to attend to that, as a matter of science and history; not to what it will be or will do, as a matter of modern politics.  It cannot count appreciably now as a material power; but, perhaps, if it can get itself thoroughly known as an object of science, it may count for a good deal,—­far more than we Saxons, most of us, imagine,—­as a spiritual power.